[Commlist] Call for Papers: ex aequo Journal - Issue 42

Call for Papers: Issue 42 ex aequo Journal

*Introduction*

​

Although neoliberal thinking and practices are subjects of considerable 
debate, most literature agrees that the emphasis on minimal state 
intervention and the extension of market relations in all aspects of 
economic activity are central to its project. David Harvey (2007, 23) 
noted how these ideas have exercised considerable influence over a wide 
range of US and international institutions and organizations, including 
education, the media, financial and banking industries and government 
regulatory agencies. Touching all aspects of our lives, both conscious 
and unconscious, «Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a 
mode of discourse and has pervasive effects on ways of thought and 
political-economic practices to the point where it has become 
incorporated into the commonsense way we interpret, live in, and 
understand the world». Neoliberalism has thus become an almost total and 
globalizing regime that supports both the logic of investment and the 
distribution of public resources and incentives for the formation of a 
«neoliberal subject», optimizing the subject’s governance according to 
market rules in terms of efficiency, individual effort and performance.

Brown describes neoliberalism as a «normative reason order» that 
«transmogrifies every human domain and endeavour, along with humans 
themselves, according to a specific image of the economic» (2015, 10). 
As a consequence, the withdrawal of the state from responsibility for 
the economic security of all its citizens, besides transferring risks 
from the collective to the individual, clearly affects social security 
and public services. Given the ways in which markets and economic 
relations are generated by gender, it is women who suffer the most from 
the impact of these policies, which is why it is key to consider the 
relationship between neoliberalism and gender, articulated in a way that 
early on feminists considered an urgent task.

In the early 1980s, Zillah Eisenstein predicted that liberal feminism 
had a radical future, with the contradictions emerging from women’s 
participation in workforce making private subordination unsustainable 
and public discrimination visible, in what would generate an impetus for 
structural change (Eisenstein 1993). Thirty years later, other 
feminists, including Eisenstein herself (2007, 2009), recognize that 
feminism walks the corridors of corporate and state power, but instead 
of challenging capitalism, it seems to have become more intimate with 
the latter. For this reason, particularly in the last decade, some 
feminists questioned the links between feminism and neoliberal efforts 
to build a free market society as well as the cooption of feminism 
itself by neoliberalism. The debate was open in the extent to which 
mainstreaming feminism helped to remove any trace of feminist politics 
(McRobbie 2009) and the ways in which feminism was becoming complicit 
with neoliberalism through its focus on ‘recognition’ claims at the 
expense of a more socialist focus on redistribution (Fraser 2009). In 
this regard, it should be remembered that Mainstreaming was adopted as a 
fundamental strategy for social change at the Fourth World Conference on 
Women: Equality, Development and Peace, held in Beijing, celebrating its 
25th anniversary in 2020.

The link between feminism and neoliberalism has received different 
names. Kantola and Squires (2012) speak of a «market feminism», 
Eisenstein (2009) of a «free market feminism» or «hegemonic feminism», 
Roberts (2012) of «transnational business feminism (TBF)», Rottenberg 
(2017) of «neoliberal feminism», Elias (2013) of «post-feminism». In the 
specific domain of communication and media studies, the links between 
neoliberalism and the media are called «post-feminism» (McRobbie 2004, 
2009; Gill 2007), «popular feminism» (Banet-Weiser 2018), or even a 
combination of both (Banet-Weiser et al. 2019). More broadly, the 
literature on feminist activism in the neoliberal era is predominantly 
concerned with the cooption of the former by the latter and with the 
inability of feminism to act as resistance to neoliberal policies and 
logics.

When questioning women in the sense of assuming themselves as desiring 
subjects, enhancing new - and multiple - identities through consumption, 
to what extent is the neoliberal logic placing the brunt of the 
responsibility to change the status quo on the individual and not the 
collective? In fact, the feminist movement, in its intellectual practice 
and political commitment, depends on a collective mobilized around the 
objective of changing society according to the interests of all women, 
instead of private individuals. How is it that a liberal context, which 
favors the right to be free from State intrusion and which places the 
emphasis on each person's personal responsibility for his/her own 
improvement and well-being, is reconciled with a whole feminist legacy 
that points to women as an «essentialist» collective?

In this edition of ex æquo , we reframe these issues taking a look at 
the last 20 years of the broad field of gender studies under neoliberalism.

It is precisely from the field of women’s, gender, feminist studies 
(WGFS) that important contributions have sought to consider how, for 
example in the Portuguese context, «the present neoliberal logic has 
promoted commodification in higher education, individualization, 
excessive workloads and performance in the academy» (Augusto et al 2018, 
107; see also Oliveira & Augusto 2017), or how «the growing emphasis on 
productivity has created opportunities for WGFS but also produced a mood 
of exhaustion and depression that has extremely detrimental impacts on 
WGFS academics’ bodies, relationships and knowledge production» (Pereira 
2019, 171).

At the centre stage of our issue will be the economic rationality that 
seeks to transform capitalist societies through the promotion of 
competition and individual freedom. Under the neoliberal regime, 
governments cease to have a practical or ethical responsibility towards 
their collective of citizens and relinquish the obligation to level the 
living conditions of all people harmed by systemic discrimination. 
Furthermore, instead of instituting policies to promote social and 
economic equality, neoliberalism calls for individual choice and 
personal responsibility as antidotes to the barriers of prejudice and 
discrimination.

But is neoliberalism a singular project or a «field of forces whose 
imperfect articulations create spaces for unexpected and potentially 
disturbing forms of agency» (Newman 2017, 99)?

Taking a retrospective gaze over the last 20 years of the interception 
between gender and neoliberalism may give us some answers that concern 
not only gender studies, but the paths of feminisms in the last two 
decades. Perhaps, as indicated by Prügl (2015, 615), we need to think 
«the ‘neoliberalisation of feminism’, recognising the diversity and 
shifting nature of various feminisms and the fluidity of their boundaries».

It will therefore be important to consider the articulation between the 
issues of women’s emancipation and neoliberalism, assuming «which 
policies are the best feminist policies, which issues and forms of 
democracy need to be stressed, which compromises need to be made in the 
struggle for gender justice and against neoliberalism, are questions 
that women active in each region and country need to decide» (Funk 2013, 
194).

*ex æquo thus invites the submission of papers that fall within the 
broad scope of the issues raised here, including, but not limited to, 
studies on:*

- university management, scientific policies and the epistemic value of 
gender studies;

- challenges of gender studies in face of post-colonial, decolonial and 
LGBTIQ perspectives;

- implications of feminist critique in the epistemological recognition 
of gender studies;

- contesting gender studies from multiple sources, among others, 
conservative antigender movements and feminist currents of sexual 
difference;

- contesting social sciences and gender studies;

- discussion of mainstreaming as a strategy for social change;

- political economy, corporatism, leadership;

- studies on media, journalism, advertising, social networks, consumption;

- studies on post-feminism, popular feminism, and liberal feminism.

*References*

Augusto, Amélia, Catarina Sales Oliveira, Emília Araújo e Carla 
Cerqueira. 2018. «The Place for Gender Research in Contemporary 
Portuguese Science and Higher Education Policies within the Context of 
Neo-liberalism». In Gender Studies and the New Academic 
Governance,107-128. Wiesbaden: Springer.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2018. Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular 
Misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Banet-Weiser, Sarah, Rosalind Gill e Catherine Rottenberg. 2019. 
«Postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism? Sarah 
Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg in conversation». 
Feminist Theory, p 1464700119842555.

Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism”s Stealth 
Revolution. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Eisenstein, Hester. 2009. Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use 
Women‘s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World, Boulder, CO: Paradigm 
Publishers.

Eisenstein, Zillah R. 1993. The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism 
.Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Eisenstein, Zillah. 2007. Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in 
Imperial Democracy . London: Zed Books.

Elias, Juanita. 2013. «Davos Woman to the Rescue of Global Capitalism: 
Postfeminist Politics and Comptitiveness Promotion at the World Economic 
Forum», International Political Sociology, 7 (2), pp. 152–69.

Fraser, Nancy. 2009. «Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History», 
New Left Review (56): 97–117.

Funk, Nanette. 2013. «Contra Fraser on Feminism and Neoliberalism», 
Hypatia, 28 (1), pp. 179–96.

Gill, Rosalind. 2007. «Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a 
sensibility». European Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2): 147-166.

Harvey, David. 2007. «Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction». The ANNALS 
of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(1): 21–44. 
doi:10.1177/0002716206296780

Kantola, Johanna e Judith Squires. 2012. «From State Feminism to Market 
Feminism», International Political Science Review, 33 (4), 382–400.

McRobbie, Angela. 2004. «Post-feminism and popular culture». Feminist 
Media Studies 4 (3): 255-264.

McRobbie, Angela. 2009. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and 
Social Change, London: Sage Newman, Janet .2017. «The politics of 
Expertise: Neoliberalism, Governance and the Practice of Politics». In: 
Higgins, Vaughan and Larner, Wendy eds. Assembling Neoliberalism: 
Expertise, Practices, Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 87–105.

Oliveira, Catarina Sales, & Augusto, Amélia. 2017. «El gender 
mainstreaming en la academia portuguesa». In Ciencia, Técnica y 
Mainstreaming Social (1): 17-27. Universitat Politècnica de València.

Pereira, Maria do Mar. 2019. «You can feel the exhaustion in the air 
around you»: The mood of contemporary universities and its impact on 
feminist scholarship. Ex æquo 39: 171-186.

Prügl, Elisabeth. 2015. «Neoliberalising Feminism», New Political 
Economy, 20(4): 614-631.

Roberts, Adrienne. 2012. «Financial Crisis, Financial Firms …  And 
Financial Feminism? The Rise of ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ and 
the Necessity of Marxist-Feminist IPE», Socialist Studies/Études 
socialistes, 8 (2), pp. 85–108.

Rottenberg, Catherine. 2017. «Neoliberal Feminism and the Future of 
Human Capital», Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (2): 
329-348.

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